It is a Carbon port of the Classic Mac OS version. IE 5.1 was one of the first two browsers ported to OS X, and is still included in OS X installs. However, while IE for Windows has seen two major revisions (5.5 and 6.0), the Mac version has been limited to minor updates and security fixes. Internet Explorer 4.0 and 4.5 were horrible on the Mac, but not long after Microsoft and Apple signed their 5-year truce, Internet Explorer 5.0 shipped for the Mac, and it was quickly (and deservedly) recognized as the premier browser for the Macintosh. IE has mirrored the up-and-down relationship between Microsoft and Apple. The third group consists of browsers with their own rendering engines: iCab, Opera, and Internet Explorer. The current version of WebCore is based on the KHTML library from KDE 3.0.2. WebCore requires the JavaScriptCore framework. KHTML is written in C++ and KWQ is written in Objective C++, but WebCore presents an Objective C programming interface. WebCore is a framework for Mac OS X that takes the cross-platform KHTML library (part of the KDE project) and combines it with an adapter library specific to WebCore called KWQ that makes it work with Mac OS X technologies. From Apple's Developer page (which does not render properly in Safari): WebCore (and the corresponding JavaScriptCore) are used by two of the browsers under review: Safari and OmniWeb. Gecko is continuously under development at. Gecko also includes a set of complementary browser components that work alongside the layout engine to form the founding platform for the Mozilla browser and for products from commercial vendors such as Netscape 6, the AOL-Gateway browsing appliance, and others. Gecko is the revolutionary next-generation browser engine designed to support open Internet standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS 1/2, the W3C Document Object Model, XML 1.0, RDF, and JavaScript. Gecko, of course, is the rendering engine developed for Mozilla. The applications reviewed can be grouped into 3 types based on their rendering engines: Gecko, WebCore, or proprietary. The final criterion is self-explanatory: how fast are the browsers? Second, how compatible is the browser? Does it "break the Internet?" Can it properly render complex sites? What about complex sites that follow standards pretty closely? How about the sites that are an absolute mess, or are coded assuming everyone in the world uses Internet Explorer 6? The ideal browser (if it exists) will be fully standards-compliant, but will still be able to accurately render as many sites as possible. ![]() First, how is the interface? Does it fit well with the OS X GUI? Does it feel like a port? Does it follow common usage conventions (e.g., delete = return to previously viewed page)? Can I manage cookies easily? In this browser smackdown, we wanted to look at three aspects of the browsing experience: user experience, compatibility, and speed. ![]() Which of the teeming multitude is the best? Ars rounded up the contenders, threw a few web pages at them, and took note of the results. ![]() Of course, that other 8.7% could be any of 8 other browsers for OS X. According to the Ars Technica site log for June 2003, Safari users accounted for 7.4% of all visits to compared to 8.7% for all other Mac web browsers. Safari is fast becoming the most popular browser for the Macintosh, and it's overall usage share has nearly doubled since its introduction. However, Mac users need not suffer with its shortcomings, as there are a plethora of web browsers for the discriminating surfer to choose from. Two-and-a-half years after the launch of OS X 10.0, Macs still ship with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2 installed and configured as the default browser. Mac users had several slow web browsers to go with their slow OS. It was a large application with its own rendering engine, and it was. There was OmniWeb 4.0 which had a beautiful rendering engine, but was slow, and Internet Explorer 5.1 which was rendered most pages accurately, but was slow. Most complaints were along the lines of poor rendering times and incompatibilities with some web sites, but the overarching theme was that despite having a modern OS for the first time in memory, Mac users were still second-class citizens when it came to surfing the web. For the first year to year-and-a-half of OS X's existence, one common complaint was the poor performance of available OS X browsers relative to other platforms.
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